on the Continent, and
particularly with Austria, acting officially and publicly; the other
faction counteracting and opposing them. These private agents were
continually going from their function to the Bastile, and from the
Bastile to employment and favor again. An inextricable cabal was formed,
some of persons of Rank, others of subordinates. But by this means the
corps of politicians was augmented in number, and the whole formed a
body of active, adventuring, ambitious, discontented people, despising
the regular ministry, despising the courts at which they were employed,
despising the court which employed them.

The unfortunate Louis the Sixteenth[35] was not the first cause of the
evil by which he suffered. He came to it, as to a sort of inheritance,
by the false politics of his immediate predecessor. This system of dark
and perplexed intrigue had come to its perfection before he came to the
throne; and even then the Revolution strongly operated in all its
causes.

There was no point on which the discontented diplomatic politicians so
bitterly arraigned their cabinet as for the decay of French influence in
all others. From quarrelling with the court, they began to complain of
monarchy itself, as a system of government too variable for any regular
plan of national aggrandizement. They observed that in that sort of
regimen too much depended on the personal character of the prince: that
the vicissitudes produced by the succession of princes of a different
character, and even the vicissitudes produced in the same man, by the
different views and inclinations belonging to youth, manhood, and age,
disturbed and distracted the policy of a country made by Nature for
extensive empire, or, what was still more to their taste, for that sort
of general overruling influence which prepared empire or supplied the
place of it. They had continually in their hands the observations of
Machiavel on Livy. They had Montesquieu's _Grandeur et Decadence des
Romains_ as a manual; and they compared, with mortification, the
systematic proceedings of a Roman Senate with the fluctuations of a
monarchy. They observed the very small additions of territory which all
the power of Prance, actuated by all the ambition of France, had
acquired in two centuries. The Romans had frequently acquired more in a
single year. They severely and in every part of it criticized the reign
of Louis the Fourteenth, whose irregular and desultory ambition had
more prov